Our giveaway is now closed, and congrats to @Poporinful, @kgoworek, and @tmcalvin for winning a copy of Slidevana!

Have you ever struggled to find the perfect slide layout to show your business concepts, research information, marketing plans, and more in a simple, easily understandable format? Whether you’re a Keynote fan or a PowerPoint devotee, it’s often easier to spend more time tweaking your slides’ design than actually researching and putting together the info you’re supposed to be presenting.

That’s where Slidevana comes in. Their team has build what they call “the ultimate presentation toolkit”, designed to take the pain out of designing slides and help you focus on presenting your message in a clear way your listeners will understand. It includes slide designs for every business concept you’ll need to present, lists, charts, and tables, to layouts that communicate complex business concepts such as timelines, architectures, sales funnels, and common frameworks. Slidevana’s vast array of layouts means that creating a presentation is as easy as copying the perfect slide and pasting the content that captures your message.

Mac users have the choice of using Apple’s Keynote app for beautiful, cinematic presentations, or the industry standard PowerPoint, both of which are great options for making presentations. Slidevana is designed to work great in both Keynote and PowerPoint, and you can either buy it for the app of your choice or get the Slidevana bundle for $99 that includes all of their slide designs for both Keynote and PowerPoint. Best of all, though, we’ve got 3 Slidevana bundles for our winners, so you could get started making better presentations for free!

Tweet to Enter

If you’d love to win a free Slidevana bundle, including over 150 slide layouts for PowerPoint and Keynote, it’s easy to get your entry submitted. All you have to do is click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet. That’s it! We’ll then randomly pick 3 winners of the bundle when we close the contest.

iOS started off as OS X’s younger sibling, but it’s grown to dominate the world of technology more than OS X in many ways. Most new hit apps come out on iOS first, it seems, especially if they’re social networking or entertainment apps. Then, though, we’re seeing a return to the Mac, with Apple putting more iOS apps and features in OS X, and more developers bringing their iOS games and apps to the Mac. Some of the best productivity apps, such as Apple’s iWork and iLife apps, and the Omnigroup’s apps like OmniFocus, started out on the Mac, and have since then been recreated for iOS.

iCloud makes it much nicer having the same apps on iOS and OS X. When you use apps like iA Writer, iWork apps, and more, you’ll see your documents seamlessly pushed between your Mac and iPad or iPhone without having to do anything extra to sync. For apps that don’t have iCloud integration, such as OmniFocus and Things, most with OS X and iOS versions have their own sync system to keep your data up-to-date everywhere. That makes it that much nicer to use the same apps on both platforms.

That’s why we’re wondering: do you use the same apps on iOS and OS X? Do you feel bad having to pay for both copies? What’s your favorite app that runs on both platforms? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Our weekly sponsor this week is Onde iTunes Converter, a great tool to help you convert your DRM protected audio files so you can listen to them anywhere, on any device.

If you’ve purchased music on your Mac in iTunes for many years, chances are you have plenty of songs in iTunes that are still protected by DRM. You could listen to the songs on your iPod, iPhone, or Mac, but you couldn’t just put them on a generic mp3 player or different smartphone. You could burn them to an audio CD and then rip them as mp3, but that’d be a lot of trouble.

That’s where Onde iTunes Converter comes in. It makes it simple to make new unlocked mp3 and AAC files from the DRMed music you own, so you can listen to it anywhere. You can convert at up to 16x in a variety of formats so you can listen just as you want. It can even rip audio from your iTunes videos! All you’ll have to do is sit back while Onde iTunes Converter works its magic.

Go Get It!

If you’d like to convert your DRMed iTunes music easily, you should give Onde iTunes Converter a try. It normally costs $39.95, but if you enter the coupon code *ondesoft50* at checkout, you’ll get 50% off for a limited time!

We just closed our Macbundler giveaway, and our winners are Worbi, Zane, jkb, Luis Gallengo, and Tensou Honretsu. Congrats to our winners, and stay tuned for our next giveaways!

If you’re needing a way to edit and OCR PDFs, run Windows apps on your Mac, make invoices, create logos, design beautiful slideshows, and more, you’ll be excited to hear about today’s giveaway! No, we don’t have a new super-app we’re featuring. Instead, we’ve got 5 copies of the Macbundler bundle to giveaway!

The Macbundler bundle is one of the most exciting bundles we’ve seen in a while, with 8 apps for $39. It’s got several very nice apps, too, that you might have already had your eye on, including PDF Editor Pro, an app that normally costs $99 and lets you edit and OCR PDFs. It also includes CrossOver XI, a Wine-powered Windows emulator that lets you run many Windows app directly on your Mac, as well as Invoice 3, a nice invoicing app.

It’s a great deal, but best of all, 5 of our winners will get the entire bundle for free!

Quite a shelf of apps!

Tweet to Enter

If you’d love to win a free copy the Macbundler bundle, it’s easy to get your entry submitted. All you have to do is click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet and the app you’re most excited about in the bundle. That’s it! We’ll then randomly pick 5 winners of the bundle when we close the contest.

We’ll announce the winners next week on August 15th, so hurry and get your entry in today! And if you want a chance to win an even bigger prize, head over to the Macbundler site, where they’re giving away 2 retina display MacBook Pros as well!

Envato staff or people who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm, however, are ineligible to enter.

If you’ve used a Mac for any amount of time, you’ve surely heard of the Omni Group‘s popular Mac apps. OmniFocus, easily their most well known app, is the leading task management app for Mac users that want to keep up with everything about their tasks and get things done. Their other apps, including OmniOutliner for outlines, OmniPlan for project management, and OmniGraffle for creating drawings and diagrams, are all category-leading apps that have been popular for years.

The Omni Group got its start as a consulting company for NeXTSTEP, the predecessor to OSX by Steve Jobs’ second company, and later transitioned to making apps for OS X. Today, all of their major apps are on iOS as well, and are in many ways leading examples of the best iOS has to offer for productivity.

Back on the Mac, Omni’s apps are still popular, and continue to be some of the best ways to get things done, make outlines and diagrams, and more. They’re a big part of the Mac app scene, and a great example of the great software you can only get on a Mac.

That’s why we’re wondering: what Omni apps do you use? Do you rely on them every day? We’d love to hear your thoughts about the Omni apps in the comments below.

In 2008, Apple kicked off the transition away from physical media. The lack of an optical drive in the MacBook Air eventually influenced the removal of it in the Mac Mini and, more recently, the next-generation MacBook Pro.

With all these Macs ditching their optical drive in order to achieve a thinner form factor, it’s time to take a look at which is better: disk or download? (more…)